Customer behaviour 'making Facebook valuable in marketing'

Customer behaviour is a successful way for marketing messages to be spread on Facebook, it has been noted.

Discussing the potential for this medium to benefit firms, ClikcZ noted one key issue is just how much customer engagement there is with the brand.

As well as the site having 600 million members, the average person posts 90 items of content each month, the news provider observed.

It added this is particularly effective because it leads to referral traffic - through means such as the clicking of the Like button and recommendations - which spread the message about products.

And this has increased in size, with 7.7 per cent of referral traffic to Amazon coming from Facebook in October 2010, up from 1.8 per cent - a 328 per cent jump - in the same month a year earlier.

During this period, the diversion of traffic to Amazon via Google actually fell 2.2 per cent as a total of all referrals, albeit with this still totalling 19.6 per cent.

And early evidence suggests the Like button is helping to drive more traffic to external sites.

New developments involving the social network site include the Facebook Deals feature, through which companies such as Starbucks, Debenhams, Argos and Mazda have linked up with the portal to offer discounts to those posting referrals to their friends.